This event is co-sponsored by the Arab Studies Table

Abstract:

Ahmed Benchemsi, a Stanford visiting scholar and award-winning Moroccan journalist, will introduce "FreeArabs.com". The new media outlet aims to provide the Arab Spring secular generation with a global platform, a digital haven for speaking out, building ties and developing a strong network. Under the editorial line "Democracy, Secularism, Fun" and with a newsy and arty activist tone, Free Arabs will expose corruption and authoritarianism in the Middle East, invoke genuine democracy as a challenge to Islamists, and fight to restore the real meaning of secularism (ie, freedom of choice) in a region where this word has long been demonized by both oppressive governments and religious zealots.

Speaker Bio:

Malaysia’s 13^th general election is imminent and the opposition coalition (Pakatan Rakyat) is fragile. Inside the coalition, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) and the secularist Democratic Action Party have little in common. PAS itself is split along generational lines and ideologically divided between reform-oriented pragmatists and hard-line Islamists. The youth wing of PAS is increasingly vocal in accusing the party of having abandoned key principles in the “Islamic struggle.” Based on anthropological fieldwork, Dominik Müller will review how PAS Youth members are contesting the party’s future in both political and cultural terms.

In Muslim politics in Malaysia, does increasing recourse to popular culture augur an incipient “post-Islamist” turn? Young Muslim activists in PAS are using YouTube and Facebook, commercial brands, celebrity personalities, and rock music to disseminate their call to “purify the struggle” for an Islamic state or “caliphate.” Do these “secular” media dilute if not drown out the politico-religious message? Or, given their popular appeal, do they render it all the more convincing? And with what implications for Islam and politics—in Malaysia and, analogously, elsewhere in the Muslim world?

Dominik Müller obtained his doctorate summa cum laude in 2012 from Frankfurt University, where he works as a research associate in the Department of Anthropology. His dissertation on Islam, politics, and youth in Malaysia will be published in 2013. His research project at Stanford, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), examines patterns of socio-legal change in the Malay world.

For years former diplomat and academic Kishore Mahbubani has closely studied the changing relationship between Asia and the United States and its consequences in works like Can Asians Think? and The New Asian Hemisphere. In The Great Convergence, his new book, he assesses East and West at a remarkable turning point in world history and reaches an incredible conclusion.

China stands poised to become the world’s largest economy as soon as 2016. Unprecedented numbers of the world’s population, driven by Asian economic growth, are being lifted out of poverty and into the middle class. And with this creation of a world-wide middle class, there is an unprecedented convergence of interests and perceptions, cultures and values: a truly global civilization.  

A full 88% of the world’s population lives outside the West and is rising to Western living standards, and sharing Western aspirations. But while the world changes, our way of managing it has not and it must evolve. The Great Convergence outlines new policies and approaches that will be necessary to govern in an increasingly interconnected and complex environment. Multilateral institutions and world-wide governing organizations must be strengthened. National interests must be balanced against global interests. The United States and Europe must share power and China, India, Africa and the Islamic world must be integrated. And the world’s increasing consumption must be balanced against environmental sustainability.

About the Speaker

From 1971 to 2004 Kishore Mahbubani served in the Singapore Foreign Ministry, where he was Permanent Secretary from 1993 to 1998, served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), and in January 2001 and May 2002 served as President of the UN Security Council.

Mahbubani is the author of Can Asians Think?, Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, and The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines have listed him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world, and in 2009 the Financial Times included him on their list of Top 50 individuals who would shape the debate on the future of capitalism. In 2010 and 2011 he was selected as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Stanford Law School.

About the Topic: For most of human history, a pitched battle was deemed a lawful way of settling an international dispute--a kind of trial, with a kind of verdict. Today the idea of settling disputes by deliberately staging battles sounds utterly lawless.  Yet the striking truth is that the battle warfare of the past was in important ways more civilized than the warfare of the present; and it is well worth asking whether we can still learn anything from the old forms of war.  Those forms were founded on a forgotten species of the law of war.  Modern law of war is humanitarian law, dedicated to preserving lives.  But our ancestors' law of war was law of victory, dedicated to answering two legal questions:  How do we know who won? What rights is the victor entitled to claim?  Those questions sound coldblooded today, but they laid the groundwork for a practice of limited warfare. 

About the Speaker: James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and specializes in comparative law, criminal law, and legal history.  He is the author of several prizewinning books, including Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial, and The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War.  He has published several notable articles, "The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty" which was published in the 2004 volume of The Yale Law Journal.  Professor Whitman received a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale, an M.A. from Columbia, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.